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Here's an interesting little economic finding: the extinction of minority languages seems to be largely driven by economic growth and success. It's perhaps not one of those explanations that we would immediately think of but once it has been brought to our attention it seems obvious enough given what is actually economic growth. In terms of public policy this perhaps means that we shouldn't worry too much about languages disappearing: because that is a signal that economic development is happening, people are becoming less poor. But people ceasing to use a language because it no longer fits their needs is one thing: we should still study, analyse and record those languages as they're all part of our shared human experience.

The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and can be found here:

By contrast, recent speaker declines have mainly occurred at high latitudes and are strongly linked to high economic growth. Threatened languages are numerous in the tropics, the Himalayas and northwestern North America. These results indicate that small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines. However, risks of future language losses are especially high in the tropics and in the Himalayas, as these regions harbour many small-population languages and are undergoing rapid economic growth.

Worth thinking through the different types of economic growth that we traditionally identify. The first is Malthusian growth. Here an advance in technology (say, a new, higher productivity, farming method) leads to there being more resources to support the new generation. More of them survive to then have their own children and the population increases. At some point in the future living standards return to where they were given that larger population. This is a reasonable description of near all economic growth before 1750 or so (and made the Rev. Malthus correct in his gloomy predictions about economic growth for pretty much all of history before he sat down to write had indeed been like this). Malthusian growth is likely to increase the population speaking whatever language it is that that society speaks. For the obvious reason that the growth is morphing into more people to speak that language.

The second form of growth is Smithian growth. Here, growth is coming from the division and specialisation of labour and the resultant trade in the increased production this enables. Almost by definition this requires that the network of people that one is trading with, dividing labour with, expands. To the point that one is, at some point, going to start doing so with people outside one's clan, tribe or language. The cooperation of trade requires that there be some ability to converse and therefore there's pressure to adopt some language which is mutually compatible. As large groups meet large groups then we might find some synthesis of language going on: as say English is an obvious synthesis of Romance and Germanic languages. Where small groups are meeting larger and trading with them then we're more likely to see the adoption of the larger group language and the extinction of the smaller.

The third type of growth is pointed to be Deepak Lal and termed "Promethian". Meaning driven by the use of fossil fuels to replace animal and human muscle power. This isn't particularly relevant here.

So our end point about language here is that we would expect language groups to increase in size in an era of Malthusian growth while we would expect minority languages to disappear in an era of Smithian growth. And that is largely what we're seeing in this research: those minor languages are being wiped out by the increased globalisation of our times. Formerly isolated language groups are entering the world economy and as they do so they're dropping their unique languages and adopting one more widely spoken as their trade networks and interactions increase.

Given that we do like it that the poor are becoming richer it's therefore not, in and of itself, a bad thing that these minor languages are no longer being used. However, this is very different from saying that nothing should be done as a matter of public policy. There's no point in our insisting that people learn a language they don't want to use of course but there's still great value in our recording, analysing and preserving these languages before they go. They are part of the cultural history of our species after all.

And the study of language, in detail, can tell us the most interesting things. In my own daily work I sometimes have to switch between the English, Germanic and Slavic names of various metals. And it's very notable when you do so that certain metals have entirely different names across the language groups while others have what is obviously just a slight variation, an accent perhaps, on a common root. Iron, in Russian, is zhelezha, (or zheleza, to taste), in German eisen, in English iron. Those last two we can construct a bridge between them but the Russian root word is obviously entirely different. As the Slavic for copper is and so on. However, tungsten in English becomes wolfram in both German and the various Slavic languages: an entirely different root. And tantalum becomes some variation of that word (tantal in Russian for example) in all languages.

So far so deeply uninteresting: but we can run this back the other way and archaeological linguists (yes, they do exist) do exactly that. If we've an entirely different root word in a different language then we rather think that that thing must have been discovered before the two languages met. However, if we've got roughly the same word then we'll assume that the invention, the discovery, was once and all adopted roughly the same word for it. And with metals this is true: iron is of course an Iron Age technology, some thousands of years old. Tantalum is a modern one, 19th century at the latest, by which time science was a global enterprise. We can even explain that odd one, tungsten and wolfram. While the element has only been in wide use since the 19th century it was independently known long before that. The miners of the Krusny Hory (where I currently work, on the Czech/German border) were mining tin/tungsten deposits for centuries before anyone knew what they might use tungsten for. But they did know it was there and they knew that they wanted to minimise how much was in their tin ore. For when you're processing the ore the tungsten content drastically reduces the amount of tin you can get from that ore. Thus the name, wolfram: the wolf that eats the tin.

And whether people use the word tungsten or wolfram stems from whether their language was influenced by that Germanic/Slavic experience or the English one despite the use and isolation of that element being a fairly late event.

There are other such dividing lines that cut right across Europe: to the east an "orange" is generally known by some variation of "Chinese apple" (applesin and the like) while to the west it's the colour, orange (arancia for example) that provides the root name. Given the origin of the fruit in China this tells us something about how they arrived in the various areas: over land, as they did in the east and the source was known, or by sea as happened in the west.

The study of languages can thus tell us a great deal about the past of our species: and so languages should be preserved and studied for exactly this reason. But people ceasing to speak a language is something else: given that it is a sign of economic development and that we do like the idea or the poor getting richer there's no corresponding insistence that languages must be preserved as living things.